****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This album of original tunes gives us a hint of what The Jam might have sounded like if Paul Weller hadn't left to form The Style Council, and had instead stuck to The Jam's 1982 era interest in 60s soul and R&B. Calling this a "Bruce Foxton" album is like calling "All Mod Cons" a Foxton album. No, this is really a "From the Jam" album with Russell Hastings filling Weller's shoes. Foxton is all over it with his trademark bass playing in top form, but most of the songs are sung by Hastings who unleashes plenty of the snarling Rickenbacker riffs we would expect, plus some nice backwards solos. The songs are strong and Hastings' singing is pretty close to sounding like Weller's. In fact, Weller gives the effort some street cred by guesting on three tracks. The MP3 version has no liner notes so I don't know how Weller pitches in--sometimes the singing is so dead on you think it must be Weller. The songs don't quite reach the amazing quality of Jam classics, but they are really strong and the album on the whole is quite excellent with strong production value and a great old school analog feel.This does not seem like a cash in and allows Foxton to make his own claim to some of the Jam legacy. It's hard to imagine The Jam without Foxton, even if Weller was the main creative engine. I remember getting in arguments with knuckleheads who though Sting was a better bassist... nonsense! The quality of this album makes me wonder what it would be like for Bruce and Russell to take solo Weller tunes and give them Jam-ish trappings to give more hints at what The Jam might have been like if they had continued.
